A well-researched and -written history that will satisfy both Eisenhower and Nixon aficionados.
Novelist and former New Yorker and Washington Post editor Frank (Trudy Hopedale, 2007, etc.) delves into political biography, focusing on the complicated relationship between President Dwight Eisenhower and his two-term vice president, Richard Nixon.
Though both private men from similar backgrounds, Eisenhower and Nixon differed in many ways. When Eisenhower chose Nixon, then a senator from California, as his running mate in 1952, it seemed to be more the choice of his advisers and one of political expediency, as a way to satisfy the right wing of the Republican Party. As Frank demonstrates, the pair’s long relationship was marked by “a fluctuating, unspoken level of discomfort,” and they were never close (even after Eisenhower’s grandson and Nixon’s daughter married in 1968). Frank points out how the eager Nixon felt “like a junior officer” in the presence of the war-hero president, who disliked Nixon personally and rarely enthusiastically supported him. Indeed, the author portrays Nixon’s vice presidency as often frustrating and stressful. In one engaging section, Frank describes how Eisenhower seriously considered removing Nixon from the re-election ticket, but he expressed it to Nixon in an unclear and passive-aggressive fashion; meanwhile, the president’s health issues made a Nixon succession a real possibility on multiple occasions. Throughout, Frank highlights the major events of the Eisenhower presidency, the following presidential elections and beyond, filtering them effectively through the lens of the Eisenhower-Nixon dynamic. The author does a fine job delineating the complex personalities of both men, and he provides novelistic touches befitting his background. At one point, he describes the colorful political figure Clare Boothe Luce as “beautiful, charming, and slightly mad,” and, at another, he thoughtfully compares Nixon to an Anthony Trollope character.
A well-researched and -written history that will satisfy both Eisenhower and Nixon aficionados.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8701-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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